1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a refrigerator, and more particularly, to a passage structure of cooling air fed to an ice machine installed in a refrigerator. Further, the invention relates to a side-by-side type refrigerator enabling inflow and outflow of cooling air to an ice machine installed in the refrigerator, and a cooling air passage structure thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a refrigerator is a machine to keep foods fresh for a predetermined time or freeze foods by lowering inner temperature thereof while refrigerant repeats a cooling cycle including compression, condensation, expansion and evaporation, and is one of life's necessities.
At the present, the refrigerator shows a tendency to increase its volume, and various types of refrigerators such as a side-by-side type refrigerator having two doors are developed so as to meet consumers' demands. Such a two door refrigerator includes a freezing chamber and a chilling chamber and further includes an ice machine for freezing water to manufacture ice and extracting and receiving the manufactured ice.
The ice machine includes an icemaker where ice is manufactured, an ice bank for storing the ice manufactured in the ice machine, an ice crusher for crushing the ice received in the ice bank and transferred thereinto, and ice dispenser for directly providing a user with the crushed ice. The ice machine is generally built in the freezing chamber of the refrigerator.
The ice machine built in the freezing chamber of the refrigerator, however, occupies too much space in the freezing chamber. Thus, since the ice machine is installed at the door of the freezing chamber, consumers who use the receiving space of the freezing chamber frequently have inconvenience.
Also, in the general side-by-side type refrigerator, since the freezing chamber is made smaller than the chilling chamber, the aforementioned inconvenience is conspicuous.